Found a sick magpie yesterday and took it to a local wildlife rehab center; a friend just reported seeing a dead a. tree sparrow in her yard, I’m worried they might have gotten the bird flu and wonder if there are iNat projects for reporting such sightings, other than just annotating the dead ones and adding a short note. Obviously testings have to be done to determine if any flu virus was detected, just wonder if there are projects already established for report possible sightings, if it makes sense.
And btw, is there a way to filter results by annotations?
this isn’t an iNature project (I apologize if that is not allowed - I am new to this site), but the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative tracks and investigates wildlife mortality/disease and also often does free diagnostics for free-ranging wildlife in Canada. You can call them about dead wildlife sightings and they will track it them in their database and will often bring the specimens in for testing (at no charge). They have regional nodes at the various Canadian Veterinary Colleges and you can find them here: http://www.cwhc-rcsf.ca/
Thanks, that looks like a very useful site, hope it includes parameters for tracking diseased birds too, besides for injured and dead ones it currently has.
CWHC only if the animals are in Canada, but other countries have agencies that do similar work, and for some taxa there are international organizations (eg for piles of sick and dead reptiles and amphibians, PARC - Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation - maintain the Herpetofaunal Disease Alert System (HDAS) which serves Canada and the USA https://parcplace.org/species/herpdiseasealert/ ). In the USA I believe the National Wildlife Health Center https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nwhc would be similar to the CWHC in Canada. Wildlife disease surveillance is important to wildlife conservation and timely reporting to someone who can investigate cause of death helps us see trouble coming and respond while there is still time. The government agency responsible for wildlife issues like species at risk listings, handling permits for researchers, etc, should be able to help find out who to call in your jurisdiction.
Still no observations of West Nile Virus, so if the birds test positive for that, you could upload pictures of the dead bird and the test result and get an iNat first.